Re: The Growing Irrelevance of "National" News in our political discourse; Generally speaking Local kicks national news directly in the balls. There's such a push to try to revive/preserve local coverage as much as possible because national basically just regurgitates its own filter and uses soothing tactics to keep its audience appeased.
Cable News' viewership numbers indicate a non-existent audience just based on even the demographics watching. Nobody but old people who just want a person talking to them 24/7 in the room (a very real thing among the elderly) and airports/doctors offices.
People who expect substance are not watching them because they know the filter for it is very thick and balanced views rarely get through. But they're seen as relevant to a degree because they're clear mouth pieces for the individual parties. Most of what we see from them now are in clip form and it's usually just to remind people how terrible Cable News is. A lot of people have unsubscribed from cable and are now considered "cord cutters" (More on that later).
Cable channels are bought as part of massive packages by Cable providers. They can't buy the most popular channels without these horrible networks being tossed in (that's the deal) because they must be served as a full course meal. Even though the individual providers hate paying for it all. So providers have no choice but to pay for a slot for them.
The productions behind these channels are heavily funded by corporate sponsors with a specific message and filter that they're adamant they want to be presented to the public (positive or negative).
Advertising is very heavy on American TV. Endless round the clock pharmaceutical ads (perfectly legal here) that seem to plague filler channels, so there's a lot of money to spread around from that industry coming through Cable. You will see anti-depressant ads, other psych/medical drugs, etc, regularly featured during breaks on Cable News.
Other corporate interests (Birch Gold, etc) also help to fund these news channels and they're following the cynics to other mediums (Youtube political commentators) to fully capture their demographic... so in some way, the content centered around distress goes hand in hand with the commercials that promote big fixes.
When watching UK channels, I've noticed our CMs are not only constant by comparison, but feature more marketing. Whereas your channels are spending more airtime in-between focus more on pleasure (at least from what I've seen) and are also freely advertising their own channel's content and entertainment options.
Our entertainment is also heavily impacted by the heavy corporate bias with what is included/not included in programming. Most programming is subsidized by in-program advertising or catering to well-specified views, often influenced by what kind of lucrative advertising they're able to most attract.
As I mentioned, any people are now "cord cutters" due to the ridiculous expense of cable TV. Many do not bother at all to subscribe to these packages because of the cherry picked filler, the limited viewpoints and catering only to specific interests and focusing too heavily on reality, cynical media and similarly distilled content.
That said, there are good national-ish newspapers that have a local grounding and they seem to do the best of all sources (imo) of bridging the gap between covering national interest and local items as well... they don't seem as tethered to "affiliates" (network news) or the bigger organizations so have a little bit more independence in terms of the opinions they choose to publish...
For national... NY Post, The Hill, The Chronicle, Washington Post (depends on the topic), WSJ are a few off the top of my head. Some are more liberal or right-leaning than others, but they also have balance... I would drill down then to more local papers at the state/city level and they tend to have a more diverse perspective on current events. Many of them have Youtube channels that are easy enough to follow and track, though I have noticed that NBC seems to region lock their content more.
Local News Coverage from a local perspective; My city has at least
5 television stations with their own local coverage. Most are fantastic quality and air several times per day. Several lease/own helicopters that are flown around just to show the viewership current traffic conditions live during AM/PM coverage. Some of these are replaced by drones, as there have been at least two crashes I know of (with fatalities) over the years, but onsite coverage is still a guarantee.
The 5 or so channels doesn't include the Spanish speaking stations that have their own news that link up to different parts of the world with their own filter,
BBC America News which features on Public Broadcasting, a Christian channel (an additional filter...) and several independent stations as well that have different types of news-ish coverage. This doesn't even AM radio which has talk. There's also several online/printed newspapers.
That's just in one city...
02-10-2025, 04:53 AM
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